


always looking for what is not yet, always

by torigates



Category: Friday Night Lights
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 12:06:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1031534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/torigates/pseuds/torigates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t a place she expected to find in her heart but she did. With Eric she did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	always looking for what is not yet, always

  
The first time Tami laid her eyes on Eric Taylor, she thought _that boy doesn’t know_ what _he’s doing_. She thought he was a full of shit football player and a grade A jerk.

Sometimes she still thought that. Other times she thought he was probably the best man she has has ever known.

+

Eric asked her to marry him in the fall. The leaves were yellow and red, and he got down on one knee and said, “Will you do me the honor of making me the luckiest man on Earth?”

Tami put her hands over her mouth, not trusting her voice. Eric looked up at her, sure and steady, never wavering, never rushing her. Tami blinked back tears and swallowed the lump in her throat. She slid down to her knees and put her hands around his shoulders.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will. Yes.”

The ring was warm against her finger from where Eric had been holding it in his pocket, next to his heart.

After twenty years Tami sometimes still feels that heat on her skin.

+

Their first apartment was tiny. The radiators never stopped hissing in the winter, and in the summer Tami walked around in her bra and underwear, their fans doing a poor job of circulating air. Eric used to press up behind her in the kitchen and run his hands over her sweat slick body. Tami would swat him away, a smile on her lips, until eventually he pulled her down to the bedroom or floor and they’d make love.

Tami misses those early days of their marriage sometimes. The way it was just the two of them, learning how to live together, learning each other’s bodies, unfettered by doubts, or debt or children. Those days when it was just the two of them were some of the happiest of her life, and even though she would never trade Julie or Gracie or the life they built together since then, sometimes she does miss it.

+

Eric found a job as an assistant coach. And then another, and another as quarterback coach. They moved six times in ten years, and that was hard on Julie. It was hard on Tami. It was hard on Eric too, though Tami knew he’d never admit it. At night she would find him sitting up at the kitchen table, their budget spread out in front of him crunching numbers.

“Babe?” she called.

He looked up and rubbed his hand through his hair. There were tight lines around his eyes, his mouth.

“Come to bed,” she said.

He nodded and turned back to the papers. “Be there in a minute,” he said.

She sat down beside him, and rubbed his back. She could still see that young, cocky football player she first met, the young man she married. He carried them with him.

“All right,” she said, pulling some of the papers toward her. “Show me.”

He did.

+

Dillon, Texas is not a place Tami expected to end up. It’s small and hot, and the average six year old knows and cares more about football, than Tami, the coach’s wife, could ever hope to. She was convinced from the moment Eric told her he’d been offered a job that she would never fit in there. Never be at home.

But it was a good, steady job with a contract, and they’d certainly uprooted their lives for less. Tami did her best and went to every game, and invited the players and their parents into their home. Her home.

Dillon was a place of love, and hope, and heartbreak. It was a place of life and death, and growth. It wasn’t a place she expected to find in her heart but she did. With Eric she did.


End file.
